JUST a decade ago most Americans would probably never have heard of Williston, a quiet agricultural town in North Dakota nestling close to the border with Canada.

A workman lines up a pipe while drilling in the Bakken shale formation

Now Williston is not only on President Obama’s radar but is under the microscope of the nation in its almost unique place at the heart of the fierce debate about the gas and oil drilling process known as fracking.

While the rest of America struggles with a lack of jobs and cities such as Detroit file for bankruptcy, unemployment in Williston is virtually zero.

Americans may agonise about the environmental devastation associated with fracking, but Williston is reminiscent of a Gold Rush town, with Greyhound buses pulling in every day full of people looking for work. Most find it, and with pay cheques more generous than their wildest dreams.

House prices in the town, which has nearly tripled in size to a population of 30,000, are soaring faster than anywhere else in the US, including New York and Los Angeles.

Every day feels like Christmas as shoppers crowd the Walmart Supercentre on 2nd Avenue.

Last week Williston produced an average 778,971 barrels of oil a day and extracted 850 million cubic feet of natural gas.

The US Department of Mineral Resources has long since given up challenging the town’s figures. “They are, quite simply, off the graph for a region that size,” a spokesman told the Sunday Express.

The incredible boom is not likely to go bust any time soon.

Geologists reckon there are as many as 24 billion barrels of crude to be extracted from the Bakken formation, a 200,000 square mile subsurface rock formation stretching from the Williston Basin to parts of Montana in the west and north to Saskatchewan and Manitoba in Canada.

For the locals such unprecedented prosperity in the midst of a national recession makes many pinch themselves in disbelief.

“This used to be Nowheresville,” said Martha Evans, a 52-year-old widow whose son David, once a farm irrigation specialist, now works as an oil rigger earning $100,000-plus (£65,000).

“Now people sit up and take notice of us. I don’t remember anyone making any kind of a stink about fracking when they voted to allow it back in the day,” says Martha.

“Folks just kind of jumped on it as a way we hoped would bring in more money.

“It has and it has changed everything...for the better.

“You won’t see stores going out of business here and you won’t see streets with boarded up houses like you do in the big cities now. I’d bet those poor souls in Detroit would give their eye teeth to trade places.”

Now Williston is on President Obama's radar

It is like the good Lord has looked down on us and endowed us with riches

Daniel Forrester

Like others in Williston, which retains a rustic charm despite the rigs peppering the horizon, Martha regularly thanks God for local good fortune during Sunday services at the First Lutheran Church on Main Street.

One of her friends, Daniel Forrester, 49, agreed: “It is like the good Lord has looked down on us and endowed us with riches. Nobody here is afraid of losing their job. The shelves in the stores are fully stocked and competition might be driving up house prices but it’s also driven down the cost of filling your grocery cart.

“We were worried that the influx of new people might send crime rates up but the Sheriff’s Office here doesn’t stand for any nonsense and this is a peaceful, law-abiding place.”

Indeed, in the past decade there have only been two murders in Williston.

Voices of dissent are few and far between, but now reports of potential water shortages, even a drought, threaten Williston’s prosperity. The Western Organisation of Resource Councils has reported that water used at high pressure in the fracking process is gone forever because it becomes too polluted to be re-used. It said: “The millions of gallons used every month will be impossible to replace.”

Elsewhere, such fears are leading to bans on fracking.

The ranching community of Mora, New Mexico, where wells are the only source of water, was the first county to outlaw it. There are calls for a ban across California where fracking could trigger an earthquake.

At the same time General Electric, one of America’s biggest companies, is spending almost £10billion on research to improve the process. The move was announced by the firm’s chief executive Jeffrey Immelt, a friend of Obama’s.